I realize that with my time here thus far I have offered little in terms technical assistance, PIC Basic snippets and so on.
So here's a nice BIG fish for everyone to cut their teeth on. A 245 LED, PC-programmable moving message display. Near-final cut, early last year the project was prototyped on two large PCBs and performed quite well. It's mandatory that high-intensity LEDs are used because the duty cycle is only around 2.8% for each column in the multiplex scheme. (Do NOT recommend expanding the display with more columns, the design is at its limits as is)
The component count is quite immense. This includes a 16f628, 24LC256 EEPROM, Max RS232, Decade Counters - 4017 variety, tonne of common passives, it'll take a couple of solid days work to put together. I can't offer the PCB layout sorry.
The zip file download includes schematics, micro controller source and Windows-based source written in Visual Basic 5.0, plus compiled executable. You will need the Virtual machine runtime DLL for the executable. This can be either msvbvm50.dll or msvbvm60.dll which are both freely obtainable.
Best Regards,
Trent Jackson
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